Comments:
My second AMV, it was intended to be the simplest choice among those I really wanted to do. I instead learned a long, painful lesson about capturing video from DVD, interlacing/deinterlacing, and inverse telecining (not to mention quirky video card problems). I now know far more than I ever wanted to know about those topics.

When I was first laying out the ideas for videos to create, the lyrics of Millenium seemed to work perfectly with Sol Bianca (though in reality, that gets a 'more-or-less' addendum). My first storyboard designs laid out the video as a series of character shots, each character being highlighted by one of the verses. That really came to look too much like my Barbie Marionette J video, though, so I scrapped that and tried a different approach. In the final version, it was more the telling of an ongoing story, from when April first found the Sol Bianca, to the end where the torch is passed to the next generation, as it had been to her.

The most difficult shot was the point where April fires the gun. I wanted a glass-shattering effect, but didn't have it available (except for a rather bland, unmodifiable one from Hollywood FX). Even getting a flash that looked right wasn't easy. I got as close as I could, and just had to be satisfied with it. The other difficult shots were where I was superimposing two shots together. Not the normal fades, but such as where April is walking away through the fire, or Jun is leaving Mayo behind. It's a delicate balance trying to get both images in there without one overwhelming the other.

Once I got the hang of where to place the frames relative to the beats, synching the scene changes up with the rhythm was rather easy.

Effects used: Lots of timing changes. I had to slow down several scenes to get them to last long enough to fit the song. My favorite subtle change was washing out the colors in the scene where April is reaching out for Jani so that they matched the colors in the darker scenes around them. Someone with more experience probably could have made good use of more low-saturation effects, perhaps a more black-and-white feel in some areas.

I started this one in mid-July, and spent the better part of a month, off-and-on, learning how to rip the video properly, though some of the problems I had were actually display bugs with my video card. I also probably spent upwards of 50 hours on the video itself (mainly tweaking and re-tweaking scenes til I found something that seemed to 'fit'). Still, many lessons were learned, so it was a worthwhile effort.

Problems aside, I really enjoyed making this video, as it helped give me a better idea of how to construct a video that wasn't just a continuous set of random cut scenes (I was trying for more of a story effect), and how to deal with digital effects.

Downloading: I got rid of the FTP access a while back because I got tired of trying to manage the ftp server. (474) Just HTTP now, but also a 'local' version due to the gracious Golden Donut/Dangling Carrot.